2014 Nominet Trust 100

The 2014 Nominet Trust 100 is revealed

The Nominet Trust 100 celebrates the people and organisations who are using digital technology to change the world for the better. Each year, it brings together, 100 of the world's most inspiring examples of social innovation, where digital technologies have been used to tackle a significant social challenge.

The NT100 aims to:

Celebrate how much is being done by social innovators to tackle real social challenges, often under the radar.

Learn from what has driven these social tech entrepreneurs and provide insights into what makes it possible for a social tech venture to have an impact at scale.

Inspire others to follow in their steps, to raise the ambitions of social innovators using technology, and accelerate the use of digital technology as a tool for significant social change.

Annika Small (Chair)

A social entrepreneur who is passionate about how digital technology can be used imaginatively to tackle long-standing social problems. Prior to Nominet Trust, Annika established and led the Tony Blair Foundation’s global education programme which uses digital technology to bring together young people across conflict zones to learn directly with, from and about each other.

From 2001-2008, Annika launched and led Futurelab, a leading educational R&D organisation that has designed new tech-enabled models of learning and assessment which have informed educational policy around the world. Prior to this, Annika launched, grew and sold a number of media businesses, having started her career as a documentary producer. A Trustee for the Design Council, Fellow of the RSA, member of BAFTA and winner of several educational awards, Annika is committed to using the power of technology to mobilise positive social change.

Caroline Daniel

Currently Editor of the Weekend FT, and was appointed in June 2010. She oversees all of the Weekend FT output, as well as managing the relationship between editorial and commercial. In 2014 she also became Chief Editorial Adviser to the FT's conferences and events division. From 2008 she ran the FT’s Op-Ed page during the financial crisis, including overseeing the Future of Capitalism series that included Amartya Sen, Alan Greenspan, Nigel Lawson, Larry Summers and PJ O Rourke. She joined the FT in 1999 covering the internet sector - from the rise of Lastminute.com to the bursting of the dotcom bubble.

She was the FT technology correspondent until 2002 when she became the FT Chicago correspondent, before moving to Washington as the FT’s White House correspondent. She won the prestigious Laurence Stern Fellowship to the Washington Post in 1998, has been a writer for New Statesman and The Economist and had worked as a researcher for Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom. She is a trustee of the IPPR, a member of the Trilateral Commission and has a FT/ Pearson Non Executive Director Diploma. She is also a regular guest on the BBC, World Service and Sky News.

Charlie Leadbeater

An independent and strategic adviser on innovation and Chair of Nominet Trust's Board of Trustees. The New York Times anointed Charlie’s idea, The Pro-Am Revolution, as one of the biggest global ideas of the last decade. His TED talks on innovation have been watched by hundreds of thousands of people. The Spectator Magazine described him as ‘the wizard of the web’ after publication of his book ‘We Think; mass innovation not mass production’ which charts the rise of more collaborative, open forms of innovation. It was an Amazon bestseller. Accenture, the global management consultancy, has ranked him one of the top management thinkers in the world, and the Financial Times ranked him the outstanding innovation expert in the UK.

Charlie was an adviser to the Downing Street Policy Unit and the Department of Trade and Industry on the internet and the knowledge driven economy, helping to shape government policy across a number of fronts. The vision statement he drafted for the Culture Online programme in 2001 predicted the web would become a platform for participation and collaboration. Charlie is a leading advisor to corporations on innovation and the impact of the web.

Dawn Austwick

Chief Executive of Big Lottery Fund, Dawn Austwick describes running an organisation that helps address some of the problems people face every day as an "unbelievable blessing". Before joining the Big Lottery Fund, Dawn was Chief Executive of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, a grant-making trust that aims to improve the quality of life throughout the UK. Prior to her time at Esmée Fairbairn, she was Deputy Director of the British Museum, Project Director of Tate Modern, a Principal Consultant at KPMG, Theatre Manager of the Half Moon Theatre, and Projects Co-ordinator at Arts & Business.

Dawn has an MBA from the London Business School and an honorary doctorate from London Metropolitan University. She is a Trustee of Historic Royal Palaces and Companion of the Chartered Institute of Management, and was also a Director of Big Society Capital during its start-up phase until September 2013.

Dickie Armour

A successful internet entrepreneur, author and speaker, Dickie Armour has extensive experience of the internet services and domain name market, having set up, run and sold two successful hosting businesses. Dickie joined the Nominet board as a Non-Executive Director in May 2011 and was re-elected in 2013. He serves on the Investment Committee and the Audit Committee. He is currently General Manager of two businesses: domain name registrar and software development company, Fibranet Services Ltd, and MyBrandEmail a company which offers a system to global brands, music artists, celebrities and sports teams that enables them to sell personalised email addresses to their fans.

A regular participant at ICANN meetings around the world, his experience and connections in the brand licensing industry have grown rapidly over the last couple of years and MyBrandEmail has partnered with some of the biggest brands in the world such as Viacom International, Warner Bros., Elvis Presley, Cartoon Network and Chelsea Football Club. Prior to 2000, Dickie was a stockbroker in London for 16 years and saw huge changes during his career from Big Bang to the dawn of electronic trading. Dickie is a passionate advocate of social media and regularly speaks on the topic at business events around the UK. He has also written two books: crime thriller, The Habit and 31 Mistakes Every Online Business Makes, aimed at small businesses.

Lucy Bernholz

Self-titled ‘philanthropy wonk’, Lucy Bernholz’s work focuses on understanding how we create, fund, and distribute shared social goods in the digital age – or what she calls, The Future of Good. Hailed as a ‘game changer’ by the Huffington Post, her award-winning blog, philanthropy2173.com, addresses philanthropy, technology, information, and policy. Lucy is a Senior Fellow at the Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society where she co-leads the Digital Civil Society Lab. She is a also a Visiting Scholar at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a Fellow with the Hybrid Reality Institute and former Fellow of the New America Foundation.

Lucy is a frequent conference speaker and oft-quoted media source for NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economic Times of India. She is the author of numerous articles and books about the philanthropy, policy, and technology, including the Blueprint Series of Annual Industry Forecasts on Philanthropy and the Social Economy, the 2010 publication Disrupting Philanthropy, and her 2004 book Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets: The Deliberate Evolution. She has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Nick O’Donohoe

Nick O’Donohoe is Chief Executive Officer of Big Society Capital (BSC). BSC was established in 2012 by the UK Government as the world’s first social investment wholesaler and is capitalised with £600 million from dormant bank accounts and the four largest UK banks. Before helping to set up BSC, Nick was at JP Morgan, latterly as Global Head of Research. He was a member of the Management Committee of the Investment Bank and the Executive Committee of JP Morgan Chase, as well as the senior sponsor for JP Morgan’s Social Finance Unit. Nick co-authored Impact Investments: An Emerging Asset Class, published by JP Morgan and the Rockefeller Foundation in November 2010.

Prior to JP Morgan Nick worked at Goldman Sachs. He is a board member of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), Chairman of the WEF Social Innovation Council, Chairman of the G8 UK Social Investment Advisory Group and a member of the Investment Committee of the Women’s World Banking Microfinance Fund (ISIS). He has an MBA from the Wharton School and a BA in Mathematical Economics and Statistics from Trinity College, Dublin.

Rodrigo Baggio

Rodrigo Baggio is Founder and President of the Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI), a global NGO headquartered in Brazil that seeks to empower people through the use of information and communication technology. CDI uses technology to fight poverty, stimulate entrepreneurship and create changemakers. A pioneer of digital inclusion in Latin America, it supports 780 CDI community centers in 13 countries across Latin America and Europe, and has had an impact on more than 1.5 million people in its 18 years.

Through his work with CDI, Rodrigo has won more than 60 awards from organisations including UNICEF, UNESCO, Time, Fortune, CNN and the World Economic Forum. Prior to CDI, he worked as an Artificial Intelligence Specialist for Accenture and managed IBM's ‘Reinventing Education’ programme. He envisaged the use of computers to promote social inclusion and launched initiatives such as the first computer donation campaign in Brazil. In 1995, he founded the first Information Technology and Citizens Rights schools in one of Rio de Janeiro's slums. He holds the honorary title of Doctor in Humane Letters from the School of Computer Science of DePaul University.

Sherry Coutu

Sherry Coutu is an Entrepreneur, Non-Exec Director, Investor and Advisor to range of Companies, Universities and Charities. She possesses a deep understanding of the dynamics of both B2B and B2C businesses as well as decades of experience in leading companies via leveraging technology. She has recently been appointed by the Mayor of London as an Ambassador for London and is currently leading a report which will recommend how to boost UK Gross Domestic Product by shifting our attention to 'supporting high growth firms as they scale up’ their operations.

In 2010 Sherry was voted by TechCrunch as the best CEO mentor/advisor in Europe. In 2011, 2012, and 2013 she was voted by Wired magazine as one the top 25 'most influential people in the wired world', and one of the top ten most influential investors and women. She was awarded a CBE in the 2013 New Year Honours from HM the Queen for‘Services to Entrepreneurship’ and was voted into the TechCrunch Industry 'Hall of Fame' in June 2014. Philanthropically, she chairs Silicon Valley comes to the UK, Founders4Schools and serves on the Cancer Research UK Crick Institute and the Harvard Business School European Advisory Council. Sherry has an MBA from Harvard, an MSc (with distinction) from the London School of Economics, and a BA (Hons with distinction) from the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Simon Devonshire

Simon Devonshire built and now directs Wayra Europe, the business accelerator that belongs to Telefonica. With seven academies in five countries across Europe, Wayra has invested in approximately 200 digital start-ups, valued at over €150m.Simultaneous to his corporate career, Simon is a serial social entrepreneur. He helped co-found and scale-up a remarkable portfolio of businesses that includes: One Water, Zopa.com, Local Data Company, Concept Cupboard and Coding Cupboard.

Prior to Wayra, Simon ran the Small Business division of O2 UK for five years, doubling the number of business customers in that time. Originally a marketer, Simon worked on a diverse range of prestigious brands including: Virgin Media, Yellow Pages, Post Office, Total, Thomas Cook, Spillers, and HJ Heinz. For many years Simon has been a passionate ambassador of start-ups, which he now champions through his active Advisory roles including Entrepreneur in Residence for the UK Government’s Department for Business Innovation and Skills, Santander’s Small Business Strategy Board, London based think-tank The Centre for Entrepreneurs, and Board Advisor roles for Make it Cheaper and Kiosked.

Tom Hulme

Soon to be joining Google Ventures Europe as a General Partner, Tom will leave his role as Design Director of IDEO but will remain Senior Advisor to IDEO and a Board Director of OpenIDEO and OIEngine. While Director at IDEO Tom founded OpenIDEO, an open innovation platform on which a community of over 60,000 users from more than 170 countries tackles big design challenges for social good. OIEngine was subsequently launched, a SaaS business enabling its clients – which includes Harvard Business School and Knight Foundation - to manage their own closed and open communities.

For the last few years Tom has been angel investing, working to address the shortage of capital and support in Europe particularly. He is also a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and has been listed in WIRED UK’s top 100 ‘digital power brokers’ for the last few years. In 2012 he was included in the Evening Standard list of London’s 1000 most influential people and he recently received an Honorary Doctorate from University Arts London.

Annika Small (Chair)

A social entrepreneur who is passionate about how digital technology can be used imaginatively to tackle long-standing social problems. Prior to Nominet Trust, Annika established and led the Tony Blair Foundation’s global education programme which uses digital technology to bring together young people across conflict zones to learn directly with, from and about each other.

From 2001-2008, Annika launched and led Futurelab, a leading educational R&D organisation that has designed new tech-enabled models of learning and assessment which have informed educational policy around the world. Prior to this, Annika launched, grew and sold a number of media businesses, having started her career as a documentary producer. A Trustee for the Design Council, Fellow of the RSA, member of BAFTA and winner of several educational awards, Annika is committed to using the power of technology to mobilise positive social change.

Baroness Martha Lane-Fox, CBE

Baroness Martha Lane-Fox, CBE is an English businesswoman, philanthropist, and public servant. She co-founded Europe’s largest travel and leisure website lastminute.com with Brent Hoberman in 1998. They took it public in 2000 and sold it in 2005. Martha was appointed a crossbench peer in the House of Lords in March 2013, becoming its youngest female member.

She is currently chair of Go On UK, a coalition of public and private sector partners that are helping millions more people and organisations online. Martha co-founded and chairs LuckyVoice, revolutionising the karaoke industry. She chairs MakieLab, Founders Forum for Good and the Government Digital Service Advisory Board. She is a Non-Executive Director at Marks & Spencer, MyDeco.com and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2007 Martha founded her own charitable foundation Antigone.org.uk and also serves as a Patron of AbilityNet, Reprieve, Camfed and Just for Kids Law. In 2013 Martha was awarded a CBE.

Caroline Daniel

Currently Editor of the Weekend FT, and was appointed in June 2010. She oversees all of the Weekend FT output, as well as managing the relationship between editorial and commercial. In 2014 she also became Chief Editorial Adviser to the FT's conferences and events division. From 2008 she ran the FT’s Op-Ed page during the financial crisis, including overseeing the Future of Capitalism series that included Amartya Sen, Alan Greenspan, Nigel Lawson, Larry Summers and PJ O Rourke. She joined the FT in 1999 covering the internet sector - from the rise of Lastminute.com to the bursting of the dotcom bubble.

She was the FT technology correspondent until 2002 when she became the FT Chicago correspondent, before moving to Washington as the FT’s White House correspondent. She won the prestigious Laurence Stern Fellowship to the Washington Post in 1998, has been a writer for New Statesman and The Economist and had worked as a researcher for Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom. She is a trustee of the IPPR, a member of the Trilateral Commission and has a FT/ Pearson Non Executive Director Diploma. She is also a regular guest on the BBC, World Service and Sky News.

Catherine McCarthy

A BBC Commissioner and Executive Producer, with a background in developing innovative programming. She is passionate about using media to make a difference in people’s lives. Previously Head of the award-winning BBC Janala Project, she spent a year working in Dhaka, Bangladesh for BBC Media Action. Catherine now works for BBC Media Action (the BBC’s International Development Charity) as a Senior Adviser, working on a wide range of international media projects.

Her previous experience at the BBC has included co-commissioning some of the BBC’s major landmarks; BBC ONE series Frozen Planet, Life in the Undergrowth and LIFE. Catherine is a mentor for Documentary Campus, a global project to develop ideas and new talent in television and film-making. She is an Advisory Member of the European Broadcasting Union’s Education and Science group, and a Governor at the Evelina Hospital School in St. Thomas’s Hospital, London

Charlie Leadbeater

An independent and strategic adviser on innovation and Chair of Nominet Trust's Board of Trustees. The New York Times anointed Charlie’s idea, The Pro-Am Revolution, as one of the biggest global ideas of the last decade. His TED talks on innovation have been watched by hundreds of thousands of people. The Spectator Magazine described him as ‘the wizard of the web’ after publication of his book ‘We Think; mass innovation not mass production’ which charts the rise of more collaborative, open forms of innovation. It was an Amazon bestseller. Accenture, the global management consultancy, has ranked him one of the top management thinkers in the world, and the Financial Times ranked him the outstanding innovation expert in the UK.

Charlie was an adviser to the Downing Street Policy Unit and the Department of Trade and Industry on the internet and the knowledge driven economy, helping to shape government policy across a number of fronts. The vision statement he drafted for the Culture Online programme in 2001 predicted the web would become a platform for participation and collaboration. Charlie is a leading advisor to corporations on innovation and the impact of the web.

Geoff Mulgan

Chief Executive of Nesta. From 2004-2011 he was the first Chief Executive of the Young Foundation, which became a leading centre for social innovation, combining research, creation of new ventures and practical projects. Between 1997 and 2004 Geoff had various roles in the UK government including director of the Government's Strategy Unit and head of policy in the Prime Minister's office. Before that he was the founder and director of the think-tank Demos. He has also been Chief Adviser to Gordon Brown MP, a lecturer in telecommunications, an investment executive and a reporter on BBC TV and radio.

He is a visiting professor at LSE, UCL, Melbourne University and a regular lecturer at the China Executive Leadership Academy. He is an adviser to many governments around the world, and has been a board member of the Work Foundation, the Health Innovation Council, Political Quarterly and the Design Council, and chair of Involve. He is also currently chair of the Studio Schools Trust and the Social Innovation Exchange.

Jeremy Heimans

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Purpose, a global initiative that draws on leading technologies, political organising and behavioural economics to build powerful, tech-savvy movements that can transform culture and influence policy. He also co-founded Avaaz.org, the fastest-growing online movement in history with more than 8 million members from 190 countries, and GetUp.org, a grassroots community advocacy organisation.

Heimans began his career with McKinsey and serves as a Member of the Advisory Board of LeapFrog Investments. He was educated at Harvard University and the University of Sydney. Jeremy has been heavily involved in campaigning and political organisation since a very young age, having for example organised a fax campaign against the first Iraq war before the internet had been invented.

Lord Jim Knight

Visiting Professor at the London Knowledge Lab in the Institute of Education, University of London. He works as a consultant specialising in advising on the use of technology in education and employment, currently working with TSL Education, Alderwood Recruitment and Step-A International Ltd. He is a co-owner of Vigasolar Ltd, developer of solar powered digital projectors for wireless use of iPads in Africa and Asia. He is chair of the UK Online Foundation and HTI Education Trust, and is a trustee of the e-Learning Foundation, and Apps for Good.

Jim Knight was the longest serving Schools minister in the UK government led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown; he also served as Rural Affairs minister and Employment minister. He attended weekly Cabinet in the year running up to the 2010 General Election, and was made a Lord by the Queen after that election. Jim’s main policy interests are education, employment, skills and digital technology. Having co-ordinated Ed Balls’s Leadership Campaign he is now Shadow Defra minister in the House of Lords.

Madhav Chavan

An Indian educator, social activist and social entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of educational non-profit Pratham, an organisation that reaches three million primary school children in India every year. He also started the Read India campaign, which aims to teach basic reading, writing and arithmetic to underprivileged children across India. Pratham has been recognised by the Kravis Prize and the Skoll Award for its innovation and leadership as a social entrepreneurial organisation in the area of education. Madhav was recently awarded the WISE Prize for Education instituted by the Qatar Foundation at the World Innovation Summit for Education, which is equated with a ‘Nobel for work done in education’.

Dr. Chavan is a creative individual who has anchored television shows, written songs about human rights and women’s rights. He enjoys working out creative ways to educate or train children and youth. He finds time to work on the challenges of teaching while balancing his duties as the CEO of a big organisation.

Professor William H. Dutton

Professor of Internet Studies, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College. Before coming to Oxford in 2002, he was a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he remains an Emeritus Professor. In the UK, he was a Fulbright Scholar 1986-87, and was National Director of the UK's Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT) from 1993 to 1996, and founding Director of the Oxford Internet Institute (2002-11). Professor Dutton is Principal Investigator of the Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS), a key resource on the use and impact of the Internet in Britain, which is one component of the World Internet Project, an international collaboration comprising over 40 nations. He is also the principal investigator on the Internet Values Project at the OII, which has been conducted in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, leading to his work on the ‘New Internet World’.

His conception of 'The Fifth Estate' of the Internet realm is the focus of his current research and a book in progress. His most recent books on the social aspects of information and communication technologies include The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (Oxford University Press, 2013), and a four volume series of readings on Politics and the Internet (Routledge forthcoming). His service includes chairing the Advisory Committee for England of the UK's Office of Communications (Ofcom), and participating on the NHS Direct Innovation Committee.

Rory Cellan-Jones

A British journalist for BBC News, specialising in economics and technology. Rory has been watching the technology scene like a hawk for the last 15 years, from the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s to the rise of Google and Facebook.

He has covered issues such as Black Wednesday, the BCCI scandal and Marks and Spencer’s competition troubles. His previous blog, Dot.Rory, was named among the Top 100 blogs by the Sunday Times. After the dot com crash of 2000, he wrote the book Dot.bomb. His work and writing explores the impact of the internet and digital technology on our lives and businesses. Rory has been described as ‘the non-geek's geek’, and freely admits that he came late to technology—but he aims to explain its significance to anyone with an interest in the subject.